Thinking about the shortly-to-be-released beta version of “Scroll,” successor to “Minecraft”? Then maybe it’d be more fun to think about grad school (probably not). Nonetheless, if you’re two-thirds of the way through your junior year (or, for go getters, if you’re coming up on the end of your sophomore year), now might not be a half-bad time to start paving the way for your acceptance to a top-notch grad school. Have a look at our top ten, time-tested, tips:

#1 Start early. You might have thought that applying to grad school was a matter of a couple of months, max. Wrong. Putting together a coherent and convincing application to a grad school, med school, law school, business school, or other graduate program is a multi-year project. Figuring out where to apply; getting good letters of recommendation; taking the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, or GMAT; writing a meaningful personal statement; preparing a good sample of your work; having a campus interview, in some cases – wow, can any mere mortal do all this? You can. If you get on the stick.

#2 Develop a focus. One of the distinguishing features of successful graduate-school-bound students is that their college programs are more than just a motley assortment of required courses and courses in their major. Instead, they make their degree more than the sum of the parts: they develop a specific concentration in their studies. For example, they don’t just do business, they focus on the use of RFIDs in inventory management; not just industrial engineering, but carbon nanotube-based computers; not just astronomy, but exoplanets and their importance. Not only will narrowing your interests within a specific field establish your distinct intellectual personality, it will help lay the foundation for your graduate or professional school application.

#3 Cozy up to a professor (or two or three). One of the most important parts of your graduate school application will be the three (or four or five) letters of recommendation. And to get good ones, the professors writing will have to know your work. Tips? Try to take more than one course from the same professor. When possible take courses from regular professors (not adjuncts and certainly not TAs)—preferably ones whose research is in the field you’re interested in. Go talk to the professor during office hours – both before you submit your papers (so he or she can be involved in the generation of your ideas), and after (so he or she can guide your future work). And, above all, be super-nice. Professors have considerable discretion in what they write, so you’ll want them to have as positive an impression of you as possible.

#4 Take the professional courses. In most departments, there are special courses set up for grad-school-bound students. Could be a small junior seminar, a senior thesis, or a capstone course. Make sure you take these and do extra-specially well in them, since the professor will remember your work in these specialized courses, come letter time.

Best-Kept Secret.Many universities allow qualified undergraduates to enroll in graduate-level classes. You should seriously consider doing this if appropriate. These can be some of the most exciting intellectual experiences and will give you a taste of what really high-level work in the field looks like.

#5 Build a “portfolio.” Many grad schools ask you to submit a sample of your work – a paper or a collection of creative works. Start getting this material together early. To really polish it up, you might need to go through many revisions and improvements. And, often, you’ll need to talk about your body of work in your personal statement—worth thinking about before December 15th of your senior year.

5-Star Tip.You should definitely involve a professor in advising you about your portfolio. It’s a major mistake to submit 60-pages ripped from your senior thesis when the receiving department is expecting a 15-page journal-quality article; or to submit slides of two or three randomly selected slides of your artwork, when what’s being looked for is a unified presentation of your artistic vision.

#6 Leverage the summers (and the winters). A summer internship or a semester or two of study abroad might really set your application apart from those of the hordes of other grad-school aspirants. Try to get an internship that consolidates or advances your focus (see tip #2 above). And, when possible (especially if you have the drive, background, and language competence), try to enroll in a program abroad that is in the regular university – rather than some special “institute” set up for foreign, English-speaking students.

#7 Pick a good senior thesis topic. A bad topic guarantees a bad thesis. So devote a lot of time up front – in careful consultation with your adviser – to finding a good topic. Make sure it’s not too broad (would require 500+ pages to cover) or too narrow (after 3 pages you have nothing more to say). And often it’s best to focus on a question to be answered rather than an area to be surveyed. Simply talking in general about a topic usually nets a descriptive report, not an analytical paper — and reports come in on the lowest rung of the intellectual food chain.

In Our Humble Opinion.It’s often a good idea to develop a topic by expanding a paper you wrote in a previous upper-division course. This allows you to hit the ground running rather than spending the first month (or two or three) feeling your way around in the dark.

#8 Prepare for the GREs (or MCATs, LSATs, GMATs). Some students think they can take the graduate school admissions exams cold. They figure they’ll go in, see how they do, then take them again if need be. But there’s no “superscoring,” or sending in the ACT instead of the SAT, to protect the downside. So get the sample questions (usually better from the administering organization, rather than the telephone-book-sized “guides”), go into a room, lock yourself up for four hours (with two ten-minute breaks), and see how you do. Often these tests are the deciders of whether you get in or not —especially if you’re coming from a lower-visibility college, where the grades aren’t always trusted by marquee graduate programs.

#9 Find out what the good graduate programs are – for you. Rather than relying on rankings or on received views about what the good grad schools are, talk to a faculty member who’s really on top of what program(s) would match your interests. Find out: Which grad schools have good faculty in your particular interest? Which grad schools are able to provide sufficient finding so you won’t be paying off this grad school thing for the rest of your life? Which grad schools actually succeed in placing their graduates in jobs (and how good are the jobs)?, and, also important, Which grad schools provide a reasonably pleasant environment for the many years you’re going to be spending there?

#10 Master the timetable. Applying to grad school is a multi-step process — most of it time-indexed. Make sure you’re 100-percent certain of what needs to be done. The two most important things? Be sure to give your profs plenty of time to write those most-important letter-of-recommendation: a month, or even two, is not too much. And make sure you’ve finished all the requirements so that you can actually go to the grad school, once you’ve gotten in. Be on top of what you’re doing at every stage of the process.